Search Engine Optimization for the Basic Webpage with Flash
Happy New Year! Marketing Technology finds and reports on the latest technology that will enable your business to effectively market to your audience, for acquisition or retention strategies. Subscribe now the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You'll also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
A new friend of mine, Tracy Garnier, needed some real help with her website. It’s a nice site, but designed for the designer and, unfortunately not for the Search Engines.
NOTE: Although some of these techniques will work, this post is not targeted for optimizing a blog. This was written for a static website with no content management system.
Some basic stats on Tracy’s site:
Tracy’s site showed up for a single search, her name mispelled. Her site is averaging about 200 hits a month - a pitiful volume for a business site that should have a large search engine following for local searches.
I know the housing market is down, but Tracy specializes in the relocation of corporate staff to Indianapolis, especially in the technology sector. There’s ample opportunity for Tracy to get a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, she’s not getting it… yet!
How I modified Tracy’s home page to make it Search Engine friendly:
I wanted to share what I did for Tracy’s site here… I think they’re some simple steps that anyone with a basic site could do to help!
- Registered the site with Google Webmasters.
- Added a robots.txt file. This tells the search engine crawlers what they should and should not be crawling.
- Added descriptive, keyword-heavy title tags and names to each of her primary links for the pages, Buyers, Sellers, Community, etc…
- Within the page content, I added descriptive, keyword-heavy section headers utilizing heading tags (h1, h2).
- Added meta descriptions and keywords. This doesn’t always help placement, but it can help with the descriptions displayed under your links. Some search engines use them, Google doesn’t.
- Since this is a geographically located site, I used Address Fix and installed meta tags with the Geographic location of the site.
- Built a sitemap using a great online tool, XML Sitemaps Sitemap Generator. Once I uploaded the sitemap, I submitted the site to Yahoo!, Google, Ask, and Live. To add to Ask, you need to ping Ask with your sitemap like this: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml. Here’s a form that will do it for you:
Submit Your Sitemap to Ask.com: - Installed Google Analytics on the site so that I could keep an eye on the traffic and search engine results.
Working with Flash and SWFObject
Since the home page is primarily Flash, there’s no way for the flash content to be indexed. However, there is a tool out there that one can take advantage of called SWFObject. It’s an ingenious little tool that loads the flash movie within a div when the page loads. The download comes with ample documentation and examples so I was able to install it in minutes.
This method is advantageous for a couple reasons:
- The user can add content within that div that will be crawled by the Search Engines but will not impact the aesthetics of the flash movie.
- That same content is fantastic when the site is accessed by a mobile browser or any other browser where flash is either not installed or Javascript is not enabled.
The next step, of course, is to make mention of Tracy’s site on my blog. It always helps to have your site mentioned on another site that has great search rankings and a high pagerank. Each time I am mentioning it, though, I’m writing different keywords and descriptions in the title of the link or the image.
There’s plenty more to do on the site, I’ll be working one page at a time until I’m through the entire site. Then I’m going to work on Tracy to get a blog up and running. 
I would absolutely agree with you. Flash intensive sites make for a fantastic user experience, but the benefits of having dynamic content indexed by a search engine far outweigh it. How great can a site be if no one can find it?
That said, great Flash programmers are able to overcome this by utilizing HTML or textual content from the pages in the Flash content… so the content can still be structured and optimized for search engines AND you can, perhaps, have a back-end for modifying that content.
SWF Object simply swaps the content of the div with the actual flash at run-time. You can use it to pass content as well, though. See the advanced notes of the sample code. Since it’s passed as a parameter, though, I don’t believe it would benefit as much as HTML content itself.
So - to respond to your comment… it ‘could’ be done. However, I’ve rarely seen a Flash developer skilled or motivated enough to do it. Personally, I would avoid it.
Thanks!
I’ve read a lot of information on this as well and Google has not said that it would penalize anyone for utilizing this method but they will penalize people for using deceitful methods to push content.
Since the content IS viewable to those without javascript enabled or Flash installed, it does NOT violate Google’s TOS
There is one thread that has some information that is useful (be sure to read the follow-up comments).
One thing to keep an eye out for is an ACTUAL example of Google penalizing someone. I’ve not seen an example yet and this method is utilized through thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of sites.
Doug